I should have seen this coming. At least I have the comfort of believing Alina is in heaven. That maybe someday I’ll gaze into a child’s eyes and see a piece of my sister’s soul in there, because the fact is I do believe we go on. Then again, maybe I’ll never see a trace of her, but I still feel her. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s as if she’s only a slight shift of reality away from me sometimes, in what I think of as the slipstream, and if I could only slip sideways, too, I could join her. And one day I think I will slip sideways and get to see her again, if only as ships passing on our way to new destinations in the same vast, magnificent sea.
Perhaps it’s a sentimental delusion to which I cling so I don’t drown in grief.
I don’t think so.
Barrons says softly, “Eternal agony or nothing. I’d have chosen agony. I gave you nothing. You weren’t cognizant. You couldn’t make the choice.”
What do we crave for those terrible decisions we’re forced to make in the course of an average lifetime?
Forgiveness. Absolution.
There’s no possibility Barrons will get it, in this lifetime or any other.
We K’Vrucked his son to grant him rest. We didn’t merely kill him, we annihilated his very being. As the Sinsar Dubh put it, a good K’Vrucking is more final than death, it’s complete eradication of all essence, of what humans like to think of as a soul.
I don’t know that I believe in souls, but I believe in something. I think each of us has a unique vibration that’s inextinguishable, and when we die it translates into the next phase of being. We may come back as a tree, or a cat, perhaps a person again, or a star. I don’t think our journey is limited. I look up at the sky, ponder the enormity of the universe and simply know that the same well of joy that birthed so much wonder gave us more than a single chance to explore it.
Not so with his son. The child is no longer in pain because he is no longer. No heaven, no hell. Just gone. As Barrons said, erased. Unlike me always sort of sensing Alina out there, Barrons can’t feel him anymore.
Who knows how long he took care of his child, searched for the way to free him, sat in his subterranean cave watching him, cultivating the hope that he would one day find the right spell, or ritual or god or demon powerful enough to change his son back.
A few months ago the never-ending ritual that had shaped his existence for thousands and thousands of years ended.
As did the hope.
And the true, long overdue grief began.
I know a simple truth: mercy killing doesn’t hold one fucking ounce of mercy for those that live.
I wonder how many times he’s caught himself walking toward his son’s stone chamber, as I caught myself walking down the hall to Alina’s bedroom with something I just had to tell her, this very moment, on the tip of my tongue. The hundredth time I did it, I realized it was either go join Dad in his black hole of depression, drink myself quietly to death at the Brickyard and die by the age of forty from liver disease — or fly to Dublin and channel my grief into a search for answers. Death is the final chapter in a book you can’t unread. You keep waiting to feel like the person you were before that chapter ended. You never will.
I open my eyes. Barrons is staring at the screen in silence. There’s no sound in the bookstore. Not a drip of water from the distant bathroom sink in the hall, no white noise from an air vent, no soft hiss of gas from the fireplace. Grief is a private thing. I respect that and I respect the man.
I begin to ease out of the room slowly.
When I back into the ottoman I forgot was there, the legs scrape across the polished wood of the floor.
Barrons’s head whips up and around, pinpoints the precise spot in which I stand.
For a moment I consider trying to be his son’s ghost for him. Give him what he’d think was a sign, ease his pain with as kind and white a lie as they come.
I know better.
Barrons is all about purity. If he ever learned the truth — and Barrons has a way of always learning the truth — he’d despise me for it. I’d have given him a gift, only to snatch it away again, and counter to mainstream cliché, for some of us it’s kinder to never have a thing at all than to have it and lose it.
Some of us love too hard. Some of us don’t seem to be able to hold that vital piece of ourselves back.
His nostrils flare as he inhales, cocks his head, and listens. He presses the Off button on the monitor. “Ms. Lane.”
Though he can’t see me, I scowl at him. “You don’t know that for certain. You guessed. I’ve been hanging around you a lot today and you didn’t know it.”
“The Sinsar Dubh protected you at the last minute. You were going to let the sidhe-seers take you rather than risk killing them.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I believed it had sifted you elsewhere, and it was taking time for you to get back.”
“Nope. Just made me invisible and told me to run.”
Pleasantries exchanged, I search for something to say that is about anything but his son. I know Barrons. Like me, he’d prefer I’d never seen him grieving.
He’ll sit and stare at his computer screen however many times he must, just as I indulge the OCD facets of my grief and, with each month that goes by, find there are three or four, sometimes as many as five additional days between those upon which I am compelled to drag out my photo albums and brood. At some point there will be ten, twenty, then thirty. Time will scar my wound and I’ll emerge from my fugue tougher, if not healed.
I decide to bitch. That’ll take his mind off things.
“You know, I just don’t get it. Every time I solve a problem, the universe lobs another one at me. And it’s always bigger and messier than the last. Am I being persecuted?”
He smiles faintly. “If only it were that personal. Life fucks you anonymously. It doesn’t want to know your name, doesn’t give a shit about your station. The terrain never stops shifting. One minute you think you’ve got the world by the balls, the next minute you don’t know where the fuck the world’s balls are.”
“Sure I do,” I say irritably. “Right next to the world’s big fat hairy asshole, upon which I seem to be stuck in superglue lately, waiting for it to have its next case of explosive diarrhea.”
He laughs. A bona-fide laugh, and I smile, grateful to have lifted a bit of sorrow from that dark, forbidding countenance. Then he says, “Move.”
“Huh? Why? You can’t even see me.”
“Off the asshole.”
“Easy for you to say. How am I supposed to do that?”
“Study the terrain. If you can’t move yourself, find something that moves the world.”
“Tall order. Isn’t it easier to move myself?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes not.”
I think about it a moment. “If Cruce was free, I’d become a secondary concern. He’d be on the asshole.”
“Which would put pretty much the entire world on the asshole with him.”
“But I’d be out of the way.”
He shrugs. “Do it.”
“You don’t mean that.” I’m not so certain he doesn’t. Barrons would probably just go along for the ride, finding no end of things to enjoy along the way. Move the world. How can I move the world? “Make me like you,” I say. “Then I wouldn’t mind being visible again because I wouldn’t have to worry about them catching me.”
“Never ask me that.”
“Jada — Dani is like you.”
“Dani is a genetically mutated human. Not like us at all. There’s a price for what we are. We pay it every day.”